TERES-I DIY laptop first shipments started in September last year and we quickly sold the first initial production run. Immediately we start to get valuable feed back. Meantime the spare parts now are online and can be ordered.

FEEDBACK

Some of the feed back was quite pleasant like this one sent from Martin Krastev:

According to best Murphy’s law practices this problem didn’t show at the first few laptops we build and tested, but when we shipped the first lot some people complained back about it, so we had to find quick solution.
1.1. adding bigger capacitor 100 uF in parallel to C204 was solving completely the issue, but the boards were already produced and shipped to customers;
1.2. adding double adhesive tape which to press the L11 to the plastic cover solved the issue in most of the cases, if this was not enough sealing the L11 with superglue also stopped the noise, which was caused by L11 vibrations, needless to say this was quick dirty and messy fix

Инфорамция как да ъпгрейднем фърмуер на touchpad и бутони:

This issue was completely fixed with adding 100uF to second production lot

2. Touch panel buttons issue. We run out of GPIOs on the keyboard board so ADC was used to scan these two buttons. Again everything was OK when we tested the few laptops we assembled in house, but soon after the shipment people start complaining that sometimes they press left button but laptop register right button and etc, quite annoying!
2.1. the problem was partially fixed with changing the firmware, we posted new keyboard PCB firmware and instructions on GitHub but this not always solved the problem
2.2. the good fix solution was to decrease the resistor values on the PCB and use 1% precision resistors instead of 5% used initially

We do apologize to all customers who had experienced such problem, we guess they are not many, but if someone has still such issue after the firmware upgrade we will send free PCB3 replacement, just please send us your requests to support@olimex.com.

In the current KITS this issue is solved.

SOFTWARE

The initial version of the Linux software was not in best shape, the community helped us a lot and we are now on the third release. Special thanks to Alexey Korepanov for reporting lot of issues and fixes! He also made his own Gentoo distribution for TERES-I at GitHub!

PLASTICS

As you all know we suck at mechanical engineering and we had to find all plastic parts from Chinese laptop supplier. Some people asked about possible 3D designs of the laptop case but we are not capable to do this. So one of our customers Jeff Moe who obviously has mechanical engineering skills decided to re-design the plastics and make them as models in 3D printed format – he sends me pictures of his progress from time to time which I post here. So 3D makers be patient – there will be soon 3D printed designs and replacement parts for TERES!

EDIT: Jeff just noted me that the design is made by Brent MacKenzie from the Colorado Printing Project.

It looks the LCD back plastic he designed is even easier to assembly than the original one.

WHAT’s NEXT

I will post more in my next post about our progress in turning TERES-I DIY Laptop in portable lab with additonal FPGA board which makes from TERES component tester, Logic Analyzer and Digital Storage Oscilloscope with Sigrok.

Today we shipped all pending orders for TERES-I and we start to get valuable feedback from our customers!

First thing – we missed the magnet assembly in the instruction manual (blush). This leaded to laptops not go in suspend mode when lit is closed.

We updated this in the assembly manual 1.1 which is now on the web and included in the GitHub too in sources so people who notice typos and want to help improveing the Bulgarian-English language in which the manual is written.

Another issue reported immediately which we missed during our testing is that on small percentage of the laptops the LCD backlight step-up inductor cause annoying sound when LCD backlight is with 50% brightness.

It’s a interesting phenomenia as the backlight PWM is 300Hz which is not possible to hear, but when LCD backlight is switch ON and OFF high current surges are happening and some harmonics cause mechanical resonance with this inductor.

The solutions may be few:

play with PWM frequency to get away from this frequency which cause the mechanical resonance – pure software approach which need lot of experimenting

adding small double adhesive matt on top of the inductor which make contact with the back plastic and this way absorb all vibrations – we start to add this mat as soon as we discover this issue to all laptops no matter if they buzz or not. Not very aestetish but quick and dirty solution:

Add more capacitors to the PWM power supply which to handle this current surge, adding 100 uF seems to remove the problem, but the first lot was already assembled and many laptops are already shipped – so this we will implement in the second assembly.

We have two reports about problems caused by the touch pad after “apt-get update / upgrade” we have to look more closely into this issue. For the moment we do not recommend you to update and upgrade your Ubuntu packages or if you do this and something stop working to revert to the original image – this is pretty easy just download the image write it to SD card, boot and run the eMMC copy script.

It was long way but finally we have laptop which works satisfactory to be released.

What we changed since revision B?

Main board now is with 2GB DDR3 ram and 16GB eMMC Flash memory. We add two new connectors CON3 and CON4 to interface the further FPGA module which will turn TERES-I in oscilloscope and Logic Analyzer.

The debug UART multiplexes now with Headphones, so you can plug serial cable to headphone jack and re-direct Debug console UART to Headphone jack. After you finish debugging you can restore Headphones functionality to this jack. We work on USB-Serial cable with headphone jack for the laptop.

We got new 9500mAh battery which now is in TERES kit.

Another improvement is 5V 3A adapter which allow battery to be charged to full in 3 hours. The adapter has charge indicator and comes with convenient 3 meter cable, so you can lay on your bed while your laptop is connected to power supply.

Please give us some days to update all latest Hardware files on Github.

The software is let’s say about 90% ready state, but works satisfactory even now.

The laptop comes with pre-installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Mate, Firefox browser, Video player, Open Office, Arduino IDE and IceStorm for FPGA development. We will try to include KiCAD later.

Python libraries to access I2C, SPI, UART, GPIOs will be add when ready.

FPGA module with ADC/DACs/IOs will be ready in the next months, it will be easy to insert inside with the other existing boards.

TERES-I is now for sale.

This project took lot of time and we have long list of registered interest for ordering, bigger than the number of laptops we could build in the first run. We guess many of these registered users are duplicated for black and white version and will take just one, but be prepared that after you order your laptop will not be shipped immediately but in 2-3 weeks (or less) depend on workload and number of orders to be processed. Once/if the first run is sold we will make the laptop out of stock and will work on second run which may take few months to complete, but we will produce this laptop until there is interest for it, so if you do not succeed to order during the first run, do not give up 🙂

EDIT: very important notice to add: TERES-I is not designed to scratch everyone’s itch. If you want high performance laptop. If your work involve 8-16-24 core processor power and 4-8-16-32GB RAM memory to do video editing or to compile Linux kernels and Android distributions etc. this is not your laptop! TERES-I software is far for complete and not using 100% performance and features of A64 chip yet, it will work much better and faster in future, now it’s work satisfactory for daily work in motion.

When TERES-I was designed we wanted to make laptop which allow you to travel and do internet browsing, emails check, embedded code development, programming arduino, making PCBs etc. With the further modules it will become more like traveling laboratory to sniff protocols on hardware level, to generate signal patterns etc.

FOSDEM was great place to present the TERES I, as there were the right people who share open source values.

We got lot of people passing through our table and got tons of feedback and suggestions. Thanks guys!

One of the most asked questions was: “can you make it with more RAM memory?” The answer is yes, we can and we even have the memory chips which easily allow TERES I to be with 2GB RAM, but these are quite expensive than the mainstream memories as they are just two 4Gb memory chips put in one package with two Chip Select signals which A64 supports. As these memories are not so used their prices is more than double of the normal DDR memory price and this is why we though initially that this will be expensive option to consider. If we put 8Gb DDR memories on TERES I instead of 4Gb and make the RAM memory 2GB this will affect the price with EUR 15. Perhaps we should just add this as option when we assembly the main boards and people can decide what to buy 1GB or 2GB RAM version.

The 4GB mainboard eMMC flash is also quite humble for storage. Micron who manufacture this eMMC has also 16GB and 32GB versions, but they are very slow to deal with, just to receive quotation from their sale reps here needs weeks and even if you order they will tell you something like 20-30 weeks delivery time. For the moment this is no go. We use these 4GB eMMC in our other boards this is why we decided to use here too. The 4GB eMMC is in stock and we can produce right now. The micro SD card connector kinda solves the storage issue as you can use up to 128GB micro SD cards, but they are not so fast as the eMMC on board. Anyway if we could make deal with Micron later we could offer mainboards with more on board eMMC.

Another interesting suggestion was to add small SPI flash on the mother board. Initially as hardware guys we decided to not do this when we designed the main board. our though was: if you have eMMC 4GB on board which you can read with 100MB/s and write with 10MB/s why would you need slow serial SPI flash with small capacity like 4MB on board? We got explanation at FOSDEM why some people would love to have it. The SPI Flash could be used to have boot code from which A64 will always boot first. The SPI Flash could be hardware write protected, i.e. you will be always sure that your processor boots trusted software and no one could overwrite it except if he has physical access to your laptop and open the plastic and put the SPI to read/write mode again. The mainboard eMMC could be overwritten from user space, so considered as compromised media for secure boot by the people who care about their security.

One more good feedback was that A64 has OTP bits, one of which once set A64 will refuse to boot unsigned code, and no one knows how to sign code for A64 yet, so this effectively bricks your device and all existing A64 boards and tablets and laptops suffer from this problem. One could now write malicious software which to set this OTP bit and brick the A64 devices on the market. Fortunately there is A64 pin which enables and diables the OTP writting at hardware level, so we are going to disable OTP write by hardware.

Another question was “can I have better display with higher resolution?” Sure you can! TERES1 laptop has eDP interface which all laptop LCDs share, so any LCD with eDP interface will work, and of course will require proper Linux setting. Right now if you do not like the current 1366×768 resolution you can search for other 11.6″ with eDP connector and spend almost as the cost of the TERES I for LCD with IPS and 2K or 3K resolution, but franky we do not see the point of fancy graphics as TERES I would never be laptop for graphics developers anyway.

Other people were asking: “can I have 16GB of RAM, SSD disk” No, unfortunately this is not possible. A64 is humble low cost processor, it has no SATA, so SSDs are not possible to connect except via USB which spoils the SATA speed. And IIRC 4GB RAM is the max A64 can address, but needs total mainboard rerouting. At this stage TERES1 would never be developer laptop which you can use to build Linux kernels, or do fancy graphics etc. We see it more like hacker tool. We made it lightweight, our target is to run on battery for long time, so you can get it while you travel. We work on FPGA internal board which you will be able to program with FOSS and to add Oscilloscope and Logic Analyzer capability at later stage while keeping all other hardware intact so it will be add-on board. We think of TERES1 as to become portable lab for hackers, to may program Arduino boards, sniff protocols at hardware level, capture analogue signals etc. it will be still good to browse internet, edit text files, code embedded software, but do not expect it to replace your desktop.

Good suggestion was to bring out the debug UART console so developer could see kernel messages without opening the laptop and solder wires. So we decided to add multiplexer and will bring Serial UART TX, RX, GND on the audio headphone jack which will be multiplexed by software, so the developers could just plug serial cable to Audio jack and debug.

Some people suggested us to place Arduino connectors near the touchpad where you add Arduino shields, this need a bit of consideration. When you do prototype work and experiments there is always possibility to damage your hardware, even now when we use Arduino we always put USB-ISO between it and the computer we use to program. With this protection we are sure that if we short something or feed high voltage to the shield by accident we will not damage our computer. So this is great idea but needs a bit of thinking.

Some people were asking: “do you think if this will be commercial success project, your laptop is so expensive, there are Chinese laptops for $50, $60, $100?”

Frankly we do not care too much about this, our core business is development boards and if you follow our blog you see that we have enough work. We spend more than year on TERES I so far and it was fun project and we learned a lot during the development. Now if it will be liked by many people or not is not so important, the important thing is that we made first step to bring to people, who appreciate open source an platform and template which they can use and improve both harware and software wise.

This is why we selected KiCAD as our CAD for designing TERES I. What is the point to release OSHW made with Altium or Eagle which will require your community to spend thousands of EUROs if want to study or modify your files? Every time you use proprietary tool to make Open Source you just decrease your community base just to people who can afford to buy the tools you used to design.

Now TERES I gives freedom to everyone to download KiCAD, the CAD files from GitHub and people can view how it’s done, learn something new, and if you do not like something you can modify it up to your taste. You can’t do with any other laptop on the market.

Note that this is just the first step, the development and the fun will continue. Once we finish the software, add on boards we will look around for more new SOC candidates as well.

Not at least everyone was asking “when it will be available for sale?”. We build our first three prototypes 3 days before FOSDEM. While we worked more than year on the harware and we solved all issues there, the software is in quite initial state.

For the moment the only working Linux Kernel which supports all A64 features is the Allwinner Android Kernel. This Kernel is full of binary blobs, but the only one which could be used for demo. Beside the binary blobs many other things are broken, like the power management, different drivers like the LCD backlight PWM, wake up from suspend, eDP converter is not set properly and works just in 15 bit color mode etc etc. We have the hardware for 50 laptops ready (developer edition), but we do not want to ship before we take care for the software. At other hand we do not want to ship TERES I with Android or RemixOS also which are complete with binary blobs and will never be Open Source.

So let’s hope we will have good enough Linux support in couple of months and we can start the shipments, until then please wait patiently, we spend over an year and now we are close to the final 🙂

All above suggestions requiring the hardware modifications for the debug console, OTP lock, SPI Flash will be implemented in the next run when the software is completed.

Hardware CAD files and Linux build scripts are on GitHub. TERES I is completely designed with KiCAD FOSS so everyone can download and learn, study, edit, modify.

Hardwarewise everything is OK and works, the software need some care to be completed, power supply management, Linux distribution, and few more details need attention, but we hope everything to be complete till Friday!